Web Directions

Current Practice and technologies

The remain­ing sec­tions of the sur­vey were much more squarely focussed on design and devel­op­ment prac­tice. There were five such sec­tions, look­ing in turn at

• Markup
• CSS and other Presentation technologies
• JavaScript, Ajax and the DOM
• Flash, Silverlight, and other embed­ded content
• Back end devel­op­ment lan­guages and systems

The aim of these sec­tions was to get an under­stand­ing of cur­rent prac­tice in each of these areas — not just the tech­nolo­gies used, and how they were used, but also under­ly­ing philoso­phies and method­olo­gies as well.

One area we specif­i­cally didn’t focus on was that of devel­op­ment tools (as opposed to lan­guages and tech­nolo­gies) respon­dents use. This is some­thing for which there is con­sid­er­able mar­ket research avail­able, and in the inter­est of lim­it­ing the amount of time respon­dents would be required to par­tic­i­pate, we decided to leave out ques­tions on tools.

Next

Next, we take a look at cur­rent markup prac­tices.